Detection of the Water Reservoir in a Forming Planetary System
Abstract
Icy bodies may have delivered the oceans to the early Earth, yet little is known about water in the ice-dominated regions of extra-solar planet-forming disks. The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared on-board the Herschel Space Observatory has detected emission from both spin isomers of cold water vapor from the disk around the young star TW Hydrae. This water vapor likely originates from ice-coated solids near the disk surface hinting at a water ice reservoir equivalent to several thousand Earth Oceans in mass. The water's ortho-to-para ratio falls well below that of Solar System comets, suggesting that comets contain heterogeneous ice mixtures collected across the entire solar nebula during the early stages of planetary birth.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1110.4600,
title = {Detection of the Water Reservoir in a Forming Planetary System},
author = {Michiel R. Hogerheijde and Edwin A. Bergin and Christian Brinch and L. Ilsedore Cleeves and Jeffrey K. J. Fogel and Geoffrey A. Blake and Carsten Dominik and Dariusz C. Lis and Gary Melnick and David Neufeld and Olja Panic and John C. Pearson and Lars Kristensen and Umut A. Yildiz and Ewine F. van Dishoeck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.4600},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
18 pages, 2 figures. Corrected typo in reported mass (in g) of detected water vapor reservoir. All conclusions are unchanged